Blue Is the Color

Fans of Chelsea Football Club around the world are extremely happy today because the Blues have returned to being champions of the English Premier League. For those of us who love them, this victory is especially sweet for several reasons. There have been close calls in the league since the last title in 2006. (The 2008 race, like this year’s, went down to the last day.) And Chelsea’s recent Champions League exits have been, for the faithful at least, heart-breaking affairs: Captain John Terry missed a penalty kick in the Moscow rain in the final of 2008, Barcelona’s Andrés Iniesta hit a wonder strike that beat them in stoppage time in the 2009 semifinal, and this year their former manager, the Portugese José Mourinho, eliminated them, with his new team Inter Milan, in the round of sixteen. So this is a particularly joyous event, one which could become even more historic next Saturday if Chelsea completes the very rare “double” by winning the FA Cup against relegation-bound Portsmouth.There will be a great many soccer fans, however, who went to bed last night grumpy, muttering vile phrases about Terry, “Fat Frank” Lampard, Didier “the Diver” Drogba, and their owner, Russian oil oligarch Roman Abramovich. It wasn’t always so; being a Chelsea fan used to evoke little if any interest. More often than not in the last five years, however, I have been put on the defensive and have faced questions about when and why I became a fan of so despicable a team.

The answer to the “when” is pretty simple, though it requires a little background. In graduate school at Oxford, I learned to love soccer while watching the 1990 World Cup with a truly international group of students. They taught me how many different versions of “the beautiful game” there could be, among them the elegant passing and finesse of Brazil, the fast and furious attacking of Cameroon, and the “boring and negative football” of England. I was hooked and made sure that I was in attendance at a World Cup quarterfinal game at Stanford Stadium in 1994, where Sweden beat Romania on penalty kicks.

A few years later I decided that I needed an English team to root for, and two friends from my Oxford days gravitated towards Chelsea for many reasons, not the least of which because they could walk to Stamford Bridge, the stadium where Chelsea plays. I embraced the Blues, then, because my friends did, but there was more: they were one of the first English teams to fill their starting eleven with players from outside of England; their internationalization of the club game, reviled by many, made them especially appealing to me. Stars from that period included Marcel Desailly and (a few years later) Emanuel Petit from France (both 1998 World Cup champions); Tore André Flo from Norway; Roberto DiMatteo, Gianlucca Vialli, and especially Gianfranco Zola from Italy. They were at that point a decent league side who went on a tear in cup tournaments, winning—in a little over a year—the FA Cup, the League Cup, the Cup Winner’s Cup (a tournament roughly equivalent to today’s Europa League), and the Super Cup (in which they beat Real Madrid).

Chelsea hadn’t won the league since 1955, and that drought didn’t seem as if it were going to end any time soon. But then in 2000, they hired Claudio Ranieri, who played a large role in assembling the team that would eventually go on to win Premier League titles under Ranieri’s successor, Mourinho, in 2005 and 2006. That this week Mourinho—who is now locked in a bitter title race with Ranieri’s Roma in the Italian Serie A—felt it necessary to call Ranieri a “loser at Chelsea” reveals both a lack of grace and a sense that Ranieri may actually complicate Mourinho’s self-proclaimed status as the “special one.”

And it was the 2003 purchase of the club by Abramovich—who ruthlessly fired Ranieri (despite Ranieri’s having led Chelsea in 2003-4 to the semifinals of the Champions League and second place in the Premier League) and hired Mourinho in 2004—that ushered in the deep hatred of “Chelski.” Abramovich changed the nature of the transfer market because of his willingness to pay outlandish sums to buy players. As for Mourinho, he was and is a master tactician, a practitioner of that dreaded “negative football,” and he made Chelsea into winners, helping build on Ranieri’s team to create a squad that gate-crashed the parties of powerhouses Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool. Since 2003, there has been a “big four” in England.

Today a new era has been ushered in at Stamford Bridge. Founded by Ranieri, turned into champions by Mourinho, and rejuvenated by the Dutch wunder-coach Guus Hiddink, Chelsea has become Carlo Ancelotti’s team. They still defend with tremendous force and are still a wonderfully resilient and cohesive side, but they now attack with a fluidity that their owner once could only dream of. In winning the title 8-0, they set a new record for most goals in a Premier League season with 103; they scored seven or more goals four times during this campaign. And they have done so with a mixture of English and international players. Three of Chelsea’s stars—Terry, Lampard, and Ashley Cole—will almost certainly start for England in next month’s World Cup. Other World-Cup-bound Blues hail from Ivory Coast (Drogba, Salomon Kalou), Nigeria (Jon Obi Mikel), Ghana (Michael Essien), Germany (Michael Ballack), and Serbia (Branislav Ivanovich).

Not all questions about supporting Chelsea are negative ones. Last April, my son and I were wearing our Chelsea shirts at Disneyworld during an FA Cup semifinal match. The shirts proved much more culturally boundary-breaking than the Epcot Center. Summoned to the shade of a playground by an inquisitive, exhausted father, we learned that he was a Ghanaian who had gone to school with Essien. A lovely conversation was facilitated by a Chelsea kit. The Chelsea team I cheer on through the sun and rain is, then, a complex entity: owned by a Russian and managed to glory by Italians and a Portugese, they play soccer in southwest London. What’s not to like?

Peter G. Platt is a Professor of English at Barnard College. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox and Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous, and is the editor of Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture. He lives in New York with his wife and son.